Tsuchiya Motohiro(  Professor, Keio University .Global Research Institute)
Komiyama Koichiro( Global Research Institute)
Tang Lan( Executive Director & Research Professor of Cyber ​​Security Research Institute, CICIR)
Wei Liang( Deputy Director of Cyber ​​Security Research Institute, CICIR)
Harada Izumi( Executive Fellow, IISE)

April 2019 to March 2020

Cyberattacks appearing with the expansion of IoT have resulted in major changes in protection of cyberspace, but also in protection of real space. Due to advances in AI, and particularly in deep learning (image recognition, etc.), the AI revolution in military affairs (RMA) is transitioning from an information war to a knowledge war, with the USA leading the transition, but China and Russia in hot pursuit. It is common knowledge that changes in the military balance directly affect changes in international relations, so we can expect international relations to be controlled by relative capabilities in development of AI in the future. The USA and China are pushing AI development forward, sharing a cyber-hegemony that has brought us into an age of so-called Sino-American AI hegemony. This state of affairs affects economies, and the resulting trade friction has contributed to competition obtaining data in cyberspace, the state of intellectual property protection and government aid surrounding AI development, and ongoing issues with Huawei Technologies and 5G.

This can be seen as a new cold-war period between the USA and China. Development of a USA-China cold war means that global markets will no longer operate according to market principles, but will become fragmented politically, with other nations becoming involved in blocs between the USA and China. History has clearly shown that this formation of blocks will be a nightmare for Japan.

As such, Japan must work hard with the USA and China, against this polarization of the world into blocks, and further to this end, Japan must also preserve and strengthen the common values that bring the free world together—of democracy, the rule of law and free markets—and find a democratic path for IT, citizens, society, public interests, and capitalism. Regarding security, Japan must maintain policies realizing the principle that Japan must protect itself, but we certainly also need to maintain and strengthen our alliance with the USA as much as possible. On the other hand, while we need to work actively to establish international rules in cyberspace, we also need to free ourselves of dependency on American industry, for cybersecurity in particular, and increase our share of independent development and production.

In this research, we conducted a survey of the latest conditions in cybersecurity and related AI technologies, and how it affects international relations in the new cold-war era, and we considered how Japan will need to respond in the future.